A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 1
Why a story idea each day for the month of April? Several reasons which I’ll work my through during this series of posts. For today, the most basic one:
If you have any aspirations of becoming a professional screenwriter, you must be in the habit of generating story concepts.
Let’s say you write and sell a spec script. Congratulations. You’re the “flavor-of-the-week.” Your agent and manager set up meetings across Hwood with producers and studio execs. The first words out of their mouths will likely be some variation of “Love your script “ (even if they haven’t really read it). The second thing they say will almost assuredly be, “What else have you got?” If you haven’t been developing other stories, that is likely to be a very short meeting.
There are many ways to generate story ideas. This month, I focus on one: Looking for ideas in news sources. Each of the items I’ll be posting for the next 30 days comes from a news site.
Today’s story idea: Foot on Bomb, Marine Defies a Taliban Trap.
SHOSHARAK, Afghanistan — If luck is the battlefield’s final arbiter — the wild card that can trump fitness, training, teamwork, equipment, character and skill — then Lance Cpl. Ryan T. Mathison experienced its purest and most welcome form.On a Marine foot patrol here through the predawn chill of Friday morning, he stepped on a pressure-plate rigged to roughly 25 pounds of explosives. The device, enough to destroy a pickup truck or tear apart several men, was buried beneath him in the dusty soil.
It did not explode.
Lance Corporal Mathison’s weight triggered the detonation of one of the booby trap’s two blasting caps. But upon giving an audible pop and tossing small stones into the air, the device failed to ignite its fuller charge — a powerful mix of Eastern Bloc mortar rounds and homemade explosives spiked with motorcycle parts, rusty spark plugs and jagged chunks of steel.
Lance Corporal Mathison and several Marines near him were spared. So began a brief journey through the Taliban’s shifting tactics and the vagaries of war, where an experience at the edge of death became instead an affirmation of friendship, and in which a veteran Marine reluctantly assumed for a morning one of the infantry’s most coveted roles: that of the charmed man.
“Goddamn Matty, man,” said Cpl. Joshua D. Villegas, the patrol’s radio operator, allowing his eyes to roam over the intact Marine after the patrol had backed away from the dud. “Lucky son of a bitch.”
Imagine a story’s Protagonist who has an experience like Matty: A soldier who literally steps on a bomb big enough to destroy a truck — but it does not explode. How would that experience affect this Protagonist character? And what might we, as screenwriters, do with that initial conceit?
- What if we keep it a war story — the saga of a platoon in Afghanistan. What if Protagonist (let’s call him Arnie) manages to dodge certain death a second time? Maybe the soldiers start to think of Arnie as their lucky charm. Perhaps they go deeper into a superstitious ritual involving Arnie. Maybe he likes the attention. Perhaps he begins to feel invincible and starts to take bigger and bigger risks. Maybe he doesn’t like the attention. He can’t stand the pressure, everyone needing him close, insisting he live according to their superstitious rituals. Does that set him up in opposition to his fellow soldiers?
- What if what is described in the NY Times article takes place in The Opening sequence of our screenplay, then we shift the story stateside where Arnie is now out of the military. The story of how he survived certain death makes the rounds in Arnie’s old neighborhood. Various people befriend Arnie— a gambler deeply in debt, a loner who can’t find a wife, a woman diagnosed with cancer. They think P’s luck may rub off on them. If Arnie manages to have something lucky happen a second or third time, a mythology could grow around him, perhaps causing people to visit from hundreds of miles away to be ‘blessed’ by Saint Lucky, bowing down to kiss his ‘lucky’ foot which stepped on the bomb — and survived.
- What if Arnie got lucky and survived stepping on a bomb, but at that precise moment, another soldier dies in a totally freak accident. Maybe the other soldier is Arnie’s best buddy. Or someone he didn’t know well. But the relief Arnie feels at having survived a date with death could get swallowed up with guilt over the other soldier’s demise. Perhaps he begins to feel as if their fates were supposed to have been reversed. After he gets out of the military or goes home on leave, might he look up the other soldier’s family. He witnesses first-hand the grief they experience. And he feels like he should do something to help. Maybe he tries to fill in as a substitute son, brother, even lover with the other soldier’s girlfriend — leading Arnie to question what is his true identity and destiny.
You can take that character and that one incident, and spin dozens of potential stories from it. Plus, you can test it out in a variety of genres — everything from a comedy, even satire, to drama and thriller.
What would you do with this story conceit? Where does your imagination take Arnie?
Tomorrow another story idea pulled from the news.